Friday, 9 June 2017

Sarah Cracknell, Saint Etienne and Home Counties

Sarah Cracknell is all too aware of the
perils of small town life. Having grown up in Berkshire and now
living in Oxfordshire, Saint Etienne's smooth-voiced chanteuse for
more than a quarter of a century is used to everyone knowing each
other's business. Playing last month's Common People Festival in
Oxford, she was prepared for the worst.

“It will be excruciating for me,”
she says a few days before the show. “There'll probably be loads of
people there who I know from my kids school or the doctor's waiting
room. Everyone knows everyone else.”

Some of this spirit has undoubtedly
crept into Home Counties, the ninth album by Saint Etienne's core
trio of Cracknell, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, who will appear at the
Queen's Hall in Edinburgh tonight leading an expanded eight-piece
line-up of the band.

There has always been a sense of place
to Saint Etienne's work. This has seen them move from an imagined
swinging London that bridged the1960s with its 1990s flipside, to
unashamedly cheesy Eurobeat. The band's seventh album, 2005's Tales
of Turnpike House, was a conceptual opus set among the residents of a
London high-rise. The cover of their most recent record, 2012's Words
and Music by Saint Etienne, featured a map of a city made up entirely
of song-titles, so Tobacco Road turns into Devil Gate Drive, which
leads to Yellow Brick Road, and so on.

All of this has been delivered with a
pop-literate knowingness and magpie-like musical sensibility. Over
the years this has seen them work with a diverse array of
collaborators, ranging from producer and mash-up auteur Richard X to
Cliff Richard's vocal arranger Tony Rivers

Even so, it's perhaps a surprise to
hear Saint Etienne returning to the sorts of places they grew up in
on Home Counties. These were worlds of new town suburbs and green
pastures, where the cliches of warm beer and the smack of cork on
willow on the cricket pitch at the local green were born.

All three members of Saint Etienne now
live outside the London that arguably made them. This meant that for
the full six weeks it took to record the album they had to commute
into town.

“It's having kids what did it,”
says Cracknell of her move to just outside Oxford, where she now
lives with her husband Martin Kelly, Saint Etienne's manager and
co-producer with his brother Paul Kelly and Bob Stanley of
feature-length documentary films. These have included impressionistic
love letter to London, Finisteere. Again, this seems a long way away
now. “Where I live is even more rural than where I grew up. They've
cut all the buses, and one of my eldest's friends is a farmer's son.
He's fifteen, and he says he was forced to drive a tractor to
school.”

Cracknell's immediate surroundings –
tractors not-withstanding - have been immortalised in Dive, one of
the songs which appears on Home Counties.

“It's about driving down the M40 out
of London to Oxfordshire, and suddenly you see all this green
countryside that's there,”she says.

The song proved to be the starting
point for the suite of songs that became the album.

“It triggered a bit of a theme,”
says Cracknell. “Bob was looking at a book, probably something he
bought at a charity shop, and started looking into where and when the
phrase home counties comes from.”

With the album featuring titles such as
Church Pew Furniture Restorer, Underneath the Apple Tree and the
wonderful Train Drivers in Eyeliner, other songs conjure up a world
of contradictions and secrets that bubble beneath its leafy facade.
In a very Saint Etienne piece of pop fantasy, Whyteleafe imagines
what would have happened if David Bowie had remained Davis Jones,
stuck forever in a desk job in Bromley.

Following an opening blast from Radio
4's The Reunion, Something New tells the story of a teenage girl
creeping through the front door after staying out all night. This may
or may not reflect Cracknell's own mis-spent youth, but, as with
Stanley and Wiggs, she got away.

“I couldn't wait to get out,” she
says. “It was really boring growing up there, and there was nothing
to do, but I was friends with a group of really cultured people. We
used to sit around talking about records and films and DJs, and out
of that boredom came a real spirit of creativity. A lot of those
people have gone on to become fashion-designers, artists or
film-makers.”

Cracknell's evocation of a small town
gang mentality sounds like the sort of scene captured in Mario's
Cafe, the opening track of Saint Etienne's 1993 So Tough album, which
saw them crossover into the charts with the Tornados referencing
You're in a Bad Way. It also sums up generations of bored teenagers
who dreamed of escaping their sleepy towns and villages, using pop
culture as a lifeline before running away to what they imagine to be
an eternally glamorous London life-style. While Saint Etienne's
series of mini musical plays for today perpetuated such a swinging
mythology, it hasn't always been reflected in reality.

“You have to be careful about the
places you mention in songs,” says Cracknell. “Someone said they
moved to Archway because of our song Archway People, and it was just
awful and they had to get out.”

With London in the midst of being
gentrified so that the sorts of places Saint Etienne have
romanticised now no longer recognisable, perhaps this too has been a
factor in the band's ever broadening horizons.

“I said to Bob that when the kids
have left school we're going to have to go on a road trip around all
the places we've mentioned in our songs,” says Cracknell.

Given how busy all three members of
Saint Etienne have been during the five years between albums, it's
unlikely they'll find the time. While Cracknell released her solo
album, Red Kite, in 2015, Stanley penned Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The
Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyonce. Wiggs, meanwhile, has
embarked on an online master's degree in orchestration and
composition.

“Get him!,” says Cracknell.

This is a long way from the band's
early days, when Stanley and Wiggs were playing Edinburgh indie-dance
club Floral Riot before releasing their first two, pre-Cracknell
singles. These were a dubby take on Neil Young's Only Break Your
Heart, followed by a similarly dreamy version of Kiss and Make Up by
The Field Mice. Cracknell's arrival gave the band a stylish sheen,
and before long they were appearing in pre Brit-pop magazine spreads
with the likes of Pulp, The Auteurs and Suede.

With a revival of sorts of the era
currently ongoing, Cracknell recently appeared on BBC 6Music's Round
Table show hosted by archetypal 1990s radio voice, Steve Lamacq. Also
on the programme was Bluetones singer Mark Morris.

“We were talking,” says Cracknell,
“and he was just about to go off and do some big 1990s thing, and I
think he was probably making an absolute packet, but apart from a
brief moment of financial jealousy I don't think I'd want that. I
hate nostalgia. It sounds like you're looking back and not forwards.”

With this in mind, after Home Counties,
what might be next for Saint Etienne? Might they take the next
logical step in their ongoing travelogue and become ex-pats, spending
their dotage in sunny Spain?

“You never know,” says Cracknell.
“We've recorded in Berlin and Sweden, so it would be nice to go
somewhere a little warmer.”

Saint Etienne, Queen's Hall, Edinburgh,
tonight. Home Counties is available now on Heavenly Records.

About Me

Coffee-Table Notes is the online archive of Neil Cooper. Neil is an arts writer and critic based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Neil currently writes for The Herald, Product, The Quietus, Scottish Art News, Bella Caledonia and The List. He has contributed chapters to The Suspect Culture Book (Oberon), Dear Green Sounds: Glasgow's Music Through Time and Buildings (Waverley) and Scotland 2021 (Eklesia), and co-edited a special Arts and Human Rights edition of the Journal of Arts & Communities (Intellect). Neil has written for Map. Line, The Wire, Plan B, The Arts Journal, The Times, The Independent, Independent on Sunday, The Scotsman, Sunday Herald, Scotland on Sunday, Sunday Times (Scotland), Scottish Daily Mail, Edinburgh Evening News, Is This Music? and Time Out Edinburgh Guide. Neil has written essays for Suspect Culture theatre company, Alt. Gallery, Newcastle, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Berwick upon Tweed Film and Media Arts Festival and Ortonandon. Neil has appeared on BBC and independent radio and TV, has provided programme essays for John Good and Co, and has lectured in arts journalism at Napier University, Edinburgh.